Reflection on building a website.

 For my Vision of the Future assignment I decided to make a website that focuses on the Design Thinking Process. I have done a little Design Thinking with previous classes and found that one of my main challenges is that I was always looking for age appropriate resources. It seemed like I was spending hours of my "spare time" looking for credible websites that suited the needs of my class. The other part of Design Thinking that I previously struggled with was giving my students all the knowledge and practice with ways to show their thinking.

The website that I created is geared to helping students through the Design Thinking Process. However, I know that this process does not happen with out a lot of support from the teacher so I also included some helpful resources for the teacher to help implement Design Thinking with their entire class. This was my first crack at making a website. I choose WIX because with a quick scan I like the templates and it seemed like it would be easy to create. Finding the resources I wanted to compile and use was not to challenging. The part I found tricky was making the website useable. I want to keep it simple by keeping the pages the same. This is where it got tricky. There were so many templates to choose from and some of the templates did not do what I wanted. For example, on one page I wanted to have videos and images with links and it wouldn't let me do both. Second, when I went add my blog the WIX creator wants you to use their blog tab, this would have meant making a new blog. With a bit of digging and thinking I was able to embed my blog in a HTML template. I am still not sure if it is going to work but we will see once I post this reflection. As much trouble as the templates gave me it was still super easy to use, especially with my click, try and undo attitude. I learned a lot.

Aside from the template not being able to do exactly what I wanted, my other challenge was making my website look and feel right. As I said, I wanted something easy that students are able to use and this meant keeping each page similar. I tried to make the pictures clickable instead of adding buttons. This was challenging again because of the templates I needed to use only have button links not image links. I also feel like I am not great a cohesively designing something. This is probably why I have lived in my house for 5 years and there is still very limited amounts of decorations in it. I have no idea how to coordinate colours, images , you name it. I found this part of designing a website super time consuming because I wanted it to be perfect. 

One this I am super excited about was all the apps and online platforms that I learned about. I have so many wonderful ideas on how I want to share some of these digital technologies with my students. The one I am most interested in investigating more over the summer break is Powtoon. I also forgot how amazing the idea of making concept maps to understand student learning and for students to understand their own learning journey. 

My website is linked above but here is the link as well.

Enjoy!